JUSTIFICATION AND CRITIQUE: THE WILL TO BELIEVE AND THE PUBLIC DIMENSION OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF ULF ZACKARIASSON “The Will to Believe” remains one of the most intriguing and controversial pragmatic contributions to philosophy of religion. Richard Rorty has offered an interesting analysis of its controversial character and suggests that we should see James as arguing for a privatization of religion: the right to adopt a believing attitude is limited to private projects that in no way affect others. I propose another reading that (1) acknowledges that religious (and other existential) commitments do have public dimensions and (2) uses those dimensions as vehicles for critical reflection. To that end, I make a heuristic distinction between two phases of inquiry that I label justification and critique, and go on to argue that when understood against the background of a pragmatic philosophical anthropology, a Jamesian approach helps clear the ground for a more comprehensive critical reflection on religion and religious traditions. Whereas Rorty sees any acknowledgement of public dimensions of religious belief as a threat to democracy, I believe that we can rather say that such acknowledgements offer resources for those who seek to develop more democratic forms of religion. WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES • VOLUME 12 • NUMBER 2 • FALL 2016 • PP. 28-51 ULF ZACKARIASSON 29 The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and one another.1 ~ The Varieties of Religious Experience ~ ames is often praised for his refusal to forget that philosophy addresses the concerns of human beings of flesh and blood.2 What some epistemic automata or J disinterested spectators would choose to believe or do in our situation is not particularly important, since our lives are not like theirs anyway. One of the papers where this humane tendency is perhaps most visible is “The Will to Believe,” where James argues, against evidentialist critics such as W. K. Clifford, that in religious matters, we are entitled to let our “passional nature” determine what to believe in cases where the evidence is inconclusive, and there is a choice to be made between live options, a choice that is both forced and momentous (that is, the choice cannot be avoided, and it matters greatly how we choose).3 James’s suggestion did provoke a number of positive and negative responses. Bertrand Russell complains – with reference to both James and Dewey – that pragmatists seem to lack the necessary humility that philosophers have traditionally inculcated by stressing the independence and importance of truth, something that leads, in turn, to a form of “cosmic impiety” that Russell describes as one of the “greatest dangers of our time.”4 And John Hick, perhaps the most respected and influential Anglo-Saxon philosopher of religion of the 20th century, and certainly no hard-boiled evidentialist, nevertheless objects to pragmatic justifications of religious beliefs because they seem to offer people a full-blown license for wishful thinking.5 More sympathetic readers have suggested that James’s position is actually rather close to Clifford’s, and also draw attention to the fact that James himself points out that the choice to let the fear of falsehood override the desire to find truth is itself a choice based on our “passional nature,” and hence not the disinterested position it often presents itself as.6 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL. 12 • NO. 2 • FALL 2016 JUSTIFICATION AND CRITIQUE 30 Can, then, the objections be writ off as due to careless readings of “The Will to Believe,” or is there some genuine worry at stake here? Richard Rorty, who certainly never took charges of ‘cosmic impiety,’ or failure to respect the inherent worth of ‘truth’ very seriously, nevertheless acknowledges the worries of James’s critics. He writes: “A minimal Clifford-like view can be summed up in the claim that, although your emotions are your own business, your beliefs are everybody’s business” – as long, that is, as you uphold the standard pragmatic understanding of ‘belief.’7 Typically, we seem unable to discuss and argue for or against emotional intentional stances such as needs, hopes, and desires, and this is what makes them problematic whenever our choices attain a public dimension. Schematically put: If we read James as saying that human needs, hopes, and desires can entitle us to adopt some religious beliefs, and we adopt the pragmatic view of beliefs as habits of action and hence also as “premises for practical reasoning,” then James may seem to offer a license for people to bring their private convictions into all kinds of public setting.8 That, Rorty seems to claim, is a worry that pragmatists should take seriously. Rorty sees only one way to come to terms with this worry: to reemphasize the individualist tenor of James’s approach to religion, and then locate religion firmly in a private sphere via two steps. First, he offers a reinterpretation of religious beliefs as ‘fuzzy’ intentional stances unable to serve ordinary functions of belief, such as prediction and control, and, hence, inaccessible to familiar types of checks and tests.9 Second, and more importantly, he draws a sharp distinction between public/collective projects of cooperation and private projects of perfection, and he proposes that we take James as saying that in our private lives, we are just as entitled to adopt a religious outlook as we are to accept or reject a job proposal without offering any intersubjectively acceptable reasons. A thus privatized religious commitment would not dictate “anybody’s moral choices save one’s own.” 10 In the public sphere, though, where we engage in cooperative projects and hence need some rough consensus on what to consider good arguments, legitimate grounds, and so on, other obligations apply, and here, no similar entitlement to let my passional nature rule the ground exists.11 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL. 12 • NO. 2 • FALL 2016 ULF ZACKARIASSON 31 Rorty’s reading of James is part of his larger programme of promoting an anticlericalist public political culture, but here, it is worth noticing that the question of what role that religion should play in public deliberation is actually logically distinct from the question of whether religion has other public dimensions that make possible and create a need for critical reflection.12 It is the latter sense of ‘public dimension’ that will concern me here, so I will not engage in a critical evaluation of anticlericalism. Nor will I question Rorty’s reading of James, which, after all, does not aim at faithful representation as much as it is an attempt to describe what James should have said.13 The purpose of this paper is, instead, to explore an alternative Jamesian response to the worry that Rorty, along with prominent critics of pragmatism, expresses, a response that – contrary to Rorty’s proposal – acknowledges the public dimensions of belief, including religious belief, and uses those dimensions as vehicles for critical reflection on religion.14 To that end, I will draw on a pragmatic philosophical anthropology to accomplish two purposes. To (1) suggest one possible, and in my view fruitful, understanding of “the will to believe-doctrine” (as I henceforth call it) as enabling us to obtain new resources for critical reflection. To that end, I make a heuristic distinction between two responses to problematic situations, justification and critique, that, I believe, can both be seen as parts of inquiry understood as the process through which we intelligently seek to restore equilibrium with the environment. Then, (2) to develop a pragmatic understanding of religion in terms of life orientations that grow out of the practical need to handle and make sense of life’s contingencies. Next, these undertakings are combined to suggest that a Jamesian approach makes possible critical reflection on religion that is broadened in two directions, compared both to much contemporary philosophy of religion and Rorty’s privatization- approach. First, it stresses the importance of evidence that we gather as participants (rather than the evidence we gather as spectators), and once we adopt a participant perspective, needs, hopes, and desires are not as inaccessible to critical reflection as Rorty (and James’s critics) take for granted. Second, it is broadened in the sense that the Jamesian approach opens for WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL. 12 • NO. 2 • FALL 2016 JUSTIFICATION AND CRITIQUE 32 more heterogeneous, non-hierarchical, and ultimately more genuinely democratic religious traditions.15 By encouraging the addressees of “The Will to Believe” to actually engage in and take responsibility for their religious impulses (combine “courage and responsibility”), a Jamesian approach creates space for a larger and diversified critical discussion of religion, a development that serves the important purpose of democratizing the religious sphere of human life. A Jamesian emphasis on individual experience as the primus motor of living religion is, then, not at all incompatible with the idea of a lively critical public reflection on religion; to the contrary, that may well be the kind of environment where individual religious impulses have a chance of developing in directions that are maximally fruitful both for the individuals themselves and for the communities to which they belong. The goal of this paper is not to save James from Rorty, but there seems to be significant problems with Rorty’s privatization-proposal, and thus a more fruitful approach forward is, I believe, to explore the way a Jamesian stress on individuals, and their responsibilities, is conducive to – not an obstacle to – a lively critical public reflection on religion. This is primarily because the private/public-distinction seems much more porous than Rorty seems to think. Even to acknowledge that religion affects my moral choices is to recognize that what I do and think affect others in a number of ways.